The Day Before

by Micol Ostow

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  She glanced over her shoulder furtively, like she didn’t want to be heard by someone in the house. “Have you spoken to Betty recently?”

  I shook my head. “Nah, we really haven’t talked since she left for LA.” It was the second time today I’d admitted as much, and it still hit me like a gut punch. “You?”

  “I’ve been trying to reach her all day,” she said, and for a second it looked like there was real panic in her eyes. “I, uh … well, I was going to leave her a note, but I don’t want—you know, Mom searches our stuff—”

  “Leave her a note? About what?” Polly was being weird enough to get me a little worried.

  A look crossed her face, like she was considering something, changing her mind. “Never mind, whatever. It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll, um, keep trying her.”

  “You sure?” Why did we all have so many secrets? And what was it going to cost us to keep them so tight to ourselves?

  “Yeah. Just … well, if you talk to her, or when you do—let her know I was trying to reach her?”

  “Chances are you’ll end up getting in touch with her way before I do,” I said. But she seemed so—I don’t know, sad, and scared for some reason. I added, “But yeah, of course.”

  “Great.” She sighed and her forehead relaxed. Whatever was going on, I’d managed to say the right thing.

  And then, from down the street, I heard it: the three short honks that meant Geraldine was waiting for me, on a shadowy stretch where Dad wouldn’t spot me.

  It was time to go.

  Geraldine knew a clearing that wasn’t too far from Striker’s Cove, but was completely secluded. She said a ring of elm trees had grown just beyond the riverbank that made a secret hideaway of their own. It wasn’t hard to find our way down there, even in the dark. We kept our arms wrapped around each other’s waists.

  “How did the trees grow in this pattern?” I asked. “It’s crazy. Like something out of a horror movie.”

  “Where’s your sense of romance?” Geraldine asked. “Nature made us our very own tree house. Literally.”

  She unrolled some pads and lay a blanket across them. We debated pitching a tent, but decided we didn’t need it. It was nice to be able to lie back and look up at the tree branches crisscrossing the sky. Stars peeked through in irregular bursts.

  “It’s beautiful here,” Geraldine said, laying her head on my chest.

  “It is. It makes me want to write a song.” Cliché, maybe, or lame, but true.

  “I brought my guitar,” she said. “But I don’t think we should play it if we’re trying to lay low. Sound carries, and you were saying you think the Adventure Scouts are nearby.”

  “No, you’re right.” I turned to one side so we were facing each other and wound my fingers through her hair. “It’s okay.”

  “I’m sure we can find other ways to pass the time,” she said.

  After that, there wasn’t much talking.

  I don’t know how late we stayed up, completely caught up in each other. There were stars against the sky, and then the darkness began to drain. At some point, we must’ve fallen asleep. When I woke, I realized two things with a start:

  First, that there were five missed calls on my phone. One was from Reggie, going off about Bulldog loyalty. The rest, though—they were all from Jughead. Crap. Not only had I told my dad I’d be hanging with Jughead, but I’d told Jughead that, too.

  A pit formed in my stomach. I was an awful friend.

  Then the second realization came, fast and clear and searingly certain. I sat up, panicked, and realized that Geraldine was doing the same.

  We both put it together at the same time, what it was that woke us up. It wasn’t the breaking daylight, or Dilton Doiley’s bugle revelry. It was a different sound: unmistakable, and un-ignorable. It was a sound I’d never forget.

  A gunshot.

  JUGHEAD

  Our story is about a town, a small town. And the people who live in that town, who intersect each other’s paths like wayward pinballs.

  From a distance, it presents itself like so many other small towns all over the world: Safe. Decent. Innocent.

  Get closer, though, and you start seeing the shadows underneath.

  Riverdale: the town with pep! But every small town has its secrets.

  One story of Riverdale—of so many of us in Riverdale—came to a head the night before the Fourth of July, events converging into cataclysmic inflection points from which we’d never recover. Betty, Archie, Veronica, and me; we were all, unwittingly, at a tipping point.

  For us, it felt like an end.

  But for one person in particular, it was the end. The real, permanent end.

  One person we’d least expect to meet such a fate.

  And so, like all good narratives, our story—Riverdale’s story, the myriad tentacles that pulled us all into and out of one another’s orbit seemingly without our own awareness, much less volition—our story became circular. Our endings led to a new story, a new beginning.

  This story begins with what the Blossom twins did on the Fourth of July.

  Just after dawn, Jason and Cheryl drove out to Sweetwater River for an early morning boat ride, as was their custom.

  The next thing we know for certain is that Dilton Doiley, who was leading Riverdale’s Adventure Scout Troop on a bird-watching expedition, came upon Cheryl by the river’s edge. She was sopping wet, sobbing, calling for Jason. But he was gone. He’d fallen out of the boat, she explained, trying to retrieve her lost glove. The theory was that he’d panicked and drowned.

  Riverdale police dragged Sweetwater River for Jason’s body, but never found it.

  So a week later, the Blossom family buried an empty casket, and Jason’s death was ruled an accident.

  Of course, Jason was captain of every sports team at Riverdale High, including water polo. And during summer vacations, he worked as a lifeguard at the country club. Which made one wonder about an accidental drowning. But nobody asked too many questions; the Blossoms were like poison roses in the garden of Riverdale, and no one wanted to get pricked by those venomous thorns.

  The Fourth of July Tragedy would soon become just another urban legend—a cautionary tale we would regurgitate endlessly.

  Until, or unless, some new revealing detail came to light.

  Every small town has its secrets. And so did the four of us. We thought we’d locked them in our own private mental vaults, boxed them up, and put them behind us. Little did we know that was impossible to do.

  Soon Veronica herself would descend on Riverdale, opening up a new mystery, a new set of legends, speculations, and whispered stories.

  There is an idea of Riverdale: of what kind of town it is, of what sort of families live there. A notion that it exists unchanged and unchanging, as if frozen in a time capsule. But that’s only one aspect of it, and only on the surface.

  The truth is, if you really want to understand Riverdale and what kind of place it is, I have to tell you about the shadows. The town beneath the town.

  I have to tell you everything. We all do. We have to come clean.

  It’s time.

  Don’t miss this sneak peek at the next Riverdale novel, Get Out of Town, coming in Summer 2019!

  JUGHEAD

  Summer. Just the mention of the word conjures a series of comforting images. Long evenings spent watching the sunset creep over the horizon, fireflies lighting up the air like renegade Fourth of July sparklers. Lazy days on a porch swing nursing a soft-serve cone, trying to strike the balance between savoring the treat and devouring it before it liquefies, sticky-sweet, under the searing press of the sun’s glow.

  Summer is for being idle, for swatting mosquitos and splashing in Sweetwater River, for ignoring the alarm clock and losing track of time. It’s for living in that state of suspended animation where any semblance of responsibility evaporates and it’s just you, your best friends, and the sensation that everything you do
and are is ephemeral, hazy … and yours alone.

  In Riverdale, summer belongs to us.

  Or that’s what we thought, anyway. Until this summer. Until Archie Andrews was arrested for murder, and forced to spend the summer before his junior year standing trial. Before we were forced to consider the terrifying—and terrifyingly real—possibility that that Archie’s trial was only the beginning.

  Cassidy Bullock. We weren’t necessarily torn up about his death. After all, he and his thug friends had terrorized us when we were up at Veronica’s cabin in Shadow Lake for the weekend. And they probably would have done worse if Veronica hadn’t triggered the silent alarm.

  So we weren’t sorry he’d been killed (presumably by the Lodge family bodyguard, Andre). What we were sorry about was that Hiram Lodge, Veronica’s father, had framed Archie for the murder. And that the charges had stuck.

  Endless summer. Summer love. The poet Wallace Stevens wrote “Summer night is like the perfection of thought.” But for Archie, Veronica, Betty, and me, there was no perfection to be found. Only the relentlessness of reality.

  For Archie, that reality meant reviewing his testimony until he was as familiar with it as he was with breathing. It was examining the case Hiram Lodge had built against him with a proverbial fine-tooth comb, alongside his mother, Mary Andrews, arguably the most devoted counsel a teen accused of murder could have in his corner.

  Second to Mary on the Team Archie lineup was Betty Cooper, pragmatic and determined, as always. Last summer, the sunny-with-a-side-of-edge girl next door was brushing up on her journalistic skills with an internship at a lifestyle blog in LA. Now, though, she was using her investigative talents to prove her oldest friend’s innocence. All this, on the heels of finding out her father was the serial killer Riverdale had known as the Black Hood.

  Meanwhile, Riverdale’s resident fish out of water, Veronica Lodge, had rejected her sizable birthright—and the tarnished strings that came with it. The one-time princess of Park Avenue had turned her back on her family name and all the financial security that it implied. And while she was trying to stake a claim of her own as the newest owner of Pop’s Chock’Lit Shoppe, she was also horn locked—and hopelessly deadlocked—with Daddy Dearest. The price at the heart of their feverish feud?

  One Archie Andrews’ liberty. Maybe even his soul.

  As for me, I was doing my best to honor my own father’s sense of loyalty, of family, adapting to my new role as Serpent King. I was worried for Archie, of course—more like desperately scared for him—though I was trying to keep a positive spin on things (it doesn’t come easy to me, to say the least). But I had a gang—literally—looking to me, depending on me to lead them. The Serpents would have done anything for me, and for the Andrews, too, especially after they put us up when Hiram Lodge displaced anyone unlucky enough to be living on the South Side. With my dad retired from the Serpents, it was time for me to show people I deserved their trust and faith.

  The problem was, I wasn’t sure I believed it.

  When Jason Blossom was murdered, the town of Riverdale lost something innate, something ineffable. For decades, our tiny community shimmered with wholesome, small-town charm. No one bothered to peel back the façade, to strip away the picture-perfect Norman Rockwell homage. No one wanted to … not even those who knew better. Those who knew all too well this town’s secrets, and its rotting, dark-hearted core.

  Jason Blossom. The Black Hood. And now Archie Andrews, one-time small-town golden boy, on trial for murder, twisting under a disgraced mobster’s thumb. Poised to lose everything, for the simple mistake of crossing the wrong man.

  Summer had stretched, sticky and unforgiving, tangling the four of us in an in intricate web. The days were endless, like all summer days, but now, the heavy, molasses pace felt dangerous, threatening.

  Labor Day was bearing down. Most teens would be dreading going back to school: homework, cliques, early wake-ups.

  We weren’t thinking about that. We would have given anything to be thinking about stuff like that. Instead, we were worried that Archie’s last chance—his last shot at freedom, at beating Hiram Lodge at his own game—was slipping away from us.

  And if we couldn’t save Archie from the dark horrors lying at Riverdale’s heart, who would?

  Micol Ostow has written over fifty works for readers of all ages, including projects based on properties like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, and most recently, Mean Girls: A Novel. As a child she drew her own Archie comics panels, and in her former life as an editor she published the Betty & Veronica Mad Libs game. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters, who are also way too pop culture–obsessed. Visit her online at micolostow.com.

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  First printing 2019

  Cover art by David Curtis

  Cover design by Heather Daugherty

  e-ISBN 978-1-338-28947-3

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